Nous Research, the startup behind the open‑source Hermes agent, is finalizing a new round led by Robot Ventures, with significant participation from USV and other prominent investors at a $1.5B valuation. The company is raising at least $75M and fielded a high level of interest from investors, coming less than three months after its $50M Series A.

Founded in 2023 by Jeffrey Quesnelle, Karan Malhotra, Ryan Teknium, and Shivani Mitra, Nous had previously raised a total of $70M from investors including Paradigm, North Island Ventures, OSS Capital, and Balaji Srinivasan. The new funding will help expand Hermes products and its business model.

Hermes distinguishes itself with built‑in “skills” such as web search, coding, and image understanding, and it automatically learns from user interaction to add new skills without intervention. Open‑source and widely adopted, Hermes has amassed roughly 214,000 stars and nearly 40,000 forks on GitHub.

Users can run Hermes locally or on a VPS, while the company offers a cloud‑hosted version with paid tiers ranging from $20 to $200 per month. The funding will support further development and broader deployment of the agent platform.